Creating a Startup Financial Plan – Excel

To keep a healthy business is to have a working financial plan that will help with guiding the business to make the right strategic decisions. Especially for startup businesses, a financial plan is a critical factor for the business’ survival against countless competitors. Hence, it is advisable to create a financial plan for startups. Usually, creating a financial plan is in Excel since it is more convenient and easier to understand by any user.

There are certain components that completes a startup financial plan in Excel which is done accordingly in a sequence to avoid going back and forth through the sheets.

1. Sales forecast – create a sales projection over the course of three years. 

2. Expenses Budget – create an expense budget plan as you need to understand the cost you’ll expend to make the sales forecast plausible.

3. Cash Flow Statement – develop a cash flow statement to track the flow of cash, in and out of your business, partly basing it off your sales forecasts, balance sheet, and other assumptions.

4. Income Projections – or the so-called revenue forecast for the upcoming three years by using the sales forecast, expense forecast, and the cash flow projection.

5. Balance Sheet Projection – deal with assets and liabilities that weren’t included in your income projection to project the net worth of your business at the end of fiscal year, especially for startups.

6. Breakeven Analysis – conduct a breakeven analysis after mapping out the whole projections, this is to assess if the business’s expenses match the sales or service volume, an important key for potential investors to refer to.

Altogether, it completes a startup financial plan in excel. The process may look simple, but it’s more than that. A lot of time is needed to be set aside just to build one for your business and to have, at least an acceptable amount of industry know-how is also needed. If you want to build a financial plan for your startup business, try to use Startup Financial Model Templates first to help you familiarize on how to create financial models for startup businesses.

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